Maduro stole Venezuela’s election. Can only the military get it back?

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Most of the world inside and outside Venezuela now agrees the country’s authoritarian socialist regime committed massive vote fraud last week.

But what’s not clear is whether that consensus can actually bring down the regime.

It seemed so in the early evening of Sunday, July 28, at polling sites like one in Barcelona, Venezuela — where locals erupted in ear-piercing screams of " ¡Libertad! ” or “Freedom!” when it was announced that, at their precinct, opposition challenger Edmundo González had defeated unpopular authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro by more than 30 percentage points.

As social media showed that day, celebrations like that one broke out at precincts all over Venezuela.

And understandably: over the past decade, Maduro has presided not only over the implosion of Venezuela's once oil-rich economy — but the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history, which has forced almost a quarter of the population to flee the country.

As a result, and more important, opposition poll watchers, organized in thousands of voter activism cells called " comanditos ," made it a point after the voting ended to get copies of those precinct vote tallies — they retrieved more than 80%, in fact — and then scan and upload them as quickly as possible to secure cyberspace.

That’s a big reason why — after Maduro’s subservient electoral authority tried to claim at around midnight on July 28 that he won the election — the opposition says it is now able to show Venezuelans and the international community that in fact González trounced Maduro by millions of votes, winning at least 66%. The regime electoral authority, meanwhile, still refuses to transparently publish the official results.

READ MORE: Venezuela's massive diaspora can't vote — but it's still firing up voters

“This is what comes with organization, this comes with participation, " says Maria Alejandra Marquez, a Venezuelan expat activist who is from Barcelona — and who helped organize volunteers in Miami on July 28 who received election reports from voters on the ground.

“The fact that we now have the information on the voting public, to be seen," Marquez told WLRN's South Florida Roundup last Friday, "is because of the incredible and brave work of Venezuelans who risked their lives to have the register of the voting in every polling site.”

Marquez is not exaggerating the risks those opposition poll workers took. The Maduro regime’s security forces are now arresting many of them — and threatening to arrest immensely popular opposition leader María Corina Machado, whom Maduro barred from running against him.

Maduro says he's thwarting a "fascist coup" against him. But in reality he's punishing them for exposing what Latin American political experts like Eduardo Gamarra of Florida International University are calling one of the region’s worst-ever instances of election fraud.

“By far it is probably the most egregious case at least in the last 60 years," Gamarra told the South Florida Roundup. "It is just so brazen. And they’re cracking down now to round up a lot of people and put them in the worst prison camps in Venezuela.”

"[Defense Minister] Padrino López might sacrifice Maduro if it meant keeping the military institution together — provided he gets an off-ramp." Brian Fonseca

Indeed, some 2,000 Venezuelans have already been locked up since July 28.

Even so, the U.S. and most other countries in the Americas and Europe — thanks to the efforts of those opposition poll workers — have concluded there is “overwhelming evidence,” as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, that Maduro did not win the election and González did.

Most credible international election observer organizations, such as the Carter Center in Atlanta, have also so far rejected Maduro’s victory claim.

No cracks at the moment

“What happened was a disaster for the Venezuelan regime," says Eduardo Repilloza, who directs the election observer nonprofit Transparencia Electoral in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"The opposition preparation for this was so unprecedented — I really think it sets a global example. It certainly goes a long way to proving that these elections can be taken advantage of in authoritarian regimes to advance democratic objectives.”

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado (with microphone) leads a mass rally in Caracas on Saturday, Aug. 3, 2024, protesting regime election fraud from the July 28 presidential vote.

But if so, why hasn’t the election result that just about everyone now agrees on resulted in the democratic objective of removing Maduro and his dictatorial regime from power?

The answer is the same one ever since Maduro took power 11 years ago: the Venezuelan military.

“I don’t see any cracks in it at the moment,” says Brian Fonseca, a Latin American military expert at FIU’s Gordon Institute for Public Policy.

Fonseca says until cracks form in the Venezuelan armed forces’ so-called “coup-proof” loyalty to Maduro, the regime will stay put. That’s especially true since, like Maduro, Defense Minister Gen. Vladimir Padrino López faces drug-trafficking charges in the U.S. — and fears going to prison if the regime falls.

Other factors keeping Venezuela's military at the regime's side are the fact that Maduro has put many of its leaders in charge of lucrative government ministries like oil and energy — Venezuela still possesses the world's largest crude reserves — and that allies like Cuba and Russia are lending their ruthless intelligence services to help Maduro detect any signs of betrayal.

Fonseca speculates that one reason Padrino’s support for Maduro might crack is if the military is forced to brutalize ordinary Venezuelans as Machado-led protests against the election fraud keep growing, a scenario that could fracture the army's officer corps as well as its rank-and-file. More than 20 Venezuelans have already been killed in demonstrations.

“There’s always a reluctance to deploy the military in the streets to combat civilians," Fonseca points out. "And so I think Padrino López would sacrifice Maduro if it meant keeping the military institution together.”

But only, Fonseca adds, if the opposition, the U.S. and the international community can offer Padrino — who once trained at the U.S. military’s School of the Americas in Georgia — a deal that keeps him and his top brass, many of whom are also accused of criminal activity, out of prison afterward.

“This is all possible," Fonseca emphasizes, "providing that he has credible, convincing off ramps."

On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department's deputy assistant secretary for the western hemisphere, Mark Wells, told reporters he could not comment on whether the U.S. was engaged in any diplomatic dialogue of that nature.

Either way, right now it's looking like the only exit off Venezuela’s road to an even darker dictatorship.

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